Suchergebnisse

We can face the fact that the factor of military power has been gaining increasing influence in the world politics. In this regard one of key tasks of international relations` studies is the exploration of armed forces` building of the countries in the dynamics. The creating a three-dimensional picture of these processes is difficult without the use of mathematical indicators, which show the key features and "narrow places" of the development and the usage of war machines' potential of the key countries in the world arena. In this article the focal case of these studies with the usage of mathematical assessments is the Bundeswehr. The reason of the given choice is the changing German role and place in the Euro-Atlantic community and the world arena as the whole. Germany has been trying to become the status of full-fare world power. One of the inherent features of this process is the growing of the Bundeswehr`s potential that had begun in the second half of 2010-s and has had the perspective by the middle 2030-s. The article presents mathematical indicators that allow to show a more voluminous assessment of the progress of building the Bundeswehr's potential and German military budget (both in general and in terms of articles of spending and other specific indicators) in comparison with other largest NATO member states. The research paper also examines the indicators that make it possible to "highlight" the peculiarities of the Bundeswehr's usage outside and inside the NATO zone of responsibility as well as issues the evolution of the foreign (allied) military presence on the territory of the FRG. The author tries to conclude the generalizations of German "war machine" development, basing on 11 mathematical indicators, 6 of which introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The paper analyses content on socio-political topics published in contemporary Russian sociological journals: "Sociological Studies", "Sociological Journal", "Siberian Socium" and "Social Sciences and Humanities. Domestic and Foreign Literature. Series 11. Sociology". The publications that were the subject of our interest were predominantly under the heading of political sociology and/or in thematically similar sections. Among the most discussed topics in the pages of the journals are the following: the domestic political agenda, primarily related to the manifestation of protest and civic activism of Russians; the role of individual political actors or institutions (state, Russian President, elite, youth, etc) in the socio-political transformations in the country; problems and outcomes of post-Soviet transformations; foreign policy issues (confron- ∗ Yadova Maiya, Institute of information for social sciences of the Russian academy of sciences (Moscow, Russia), e-mail: m.yadova@mail.ru Political science (RU), 2021, N 4 305 tation between Russia and Western countries, threats to national security), sociopolitical structure of other world powers. A small proportion of the studies in this segment focus on new concepts and theoretical and methodological approaches in political sociology, or on socio-political phenomena that have not yet been sufficiently explored. The thematic repertoire of journals depends on their genre peculiarity. General sociology journals are characterised by coverage of a wide range of political issues. In the journal "Siberian Socium", as expected, there is a prevalence of works with a regional focus, but there are also some more general works. Abstract journal "Sociology", due to its specificity, is primarily represented by secondary information and analytical materials (abstracts, literature reviews, book reviews), which as a rule are based on foreign-language sources of scientific literature.

Modern French society, with a light hand of the sociologist J. Fourquet, is more often called the «archipelago». Social splits in it run along many lines: socio-economic inequality is growing, socio-territorial disproportions are growing, and the conflict of generations is becoming more and more visible. France is not the only country where social divisions are strong, but its feature is that 56% of GDP is redistributed by the state, according to this indicator, France is the leader of the EU. Generous social policies help to fight poverty, but they don't save the middle class. Its numbers are dwindling and fragmented. The «pauperization» of the middle class is one of the most serious social consequences of France's entry into the global information economy. Another consequence of this process is the division of workers into those who have joined the open knowledge economy and those who have been left behind. Contradictions between generations are growing, French youth are «plunging» into poverty. Socially homogeneous territories are formed within the country, which means that different social classes and groups no longer «meet», and each lives in his own space. The article examines new and previous social divisions that have serious political and social consequences.

Обзор основан на анализе статей, которые рассматривают внутреннюю политику современной России с акцентом на социальной проблематике. В центре размышлений исследователей - национальные проекты РФ, их социальное и экономическое значение, приоритеты государственной политики в области демографии.

In his new book «The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread, But Can't Be Computed» C. Koch develops the account of the phenomenon of consciousness from the standpoint of the theory of integrated information proposed by the Italian neuroscientist G. Tononi. The starting point of this theory is the attempt to single out the most important properties of the consciousness itself and, on this basis, to determine what kind of physical systems are capable of having experience. According to the proponents of the theory of integrated information, the key properties of experience include its intrinsic existence, its composition, information, integration, and exclusion. From the statements describing the properties of consciousness, called axioms, the theory derives the statements about the properties of the physical substrate of experience, which are called postulates. The theory of integrated information claims to develop a conceptual apparatus for an exact quantitative assessment of the level of possible experience in any system. This theory formulates several interesting predictions, including the possibility of merging many individual experiences into a single experience, if with the help of some future technology an information bridge is established between the substrates that implement them, and also that consciousness cannot be obtained as a result of simulation on a digital computer.

The review presents such conceptual developments as postmodernism and political technology approaches of the Club of Rome (RC). They are updated in response to uncertainty and expectations of a new post-pandemic order. The authors of the report «Come on!» 2018 strongly criticize modern capitalism and financial speculation, and besides promote the project of «New Enlightenment». In 2020, experts of the RC highly appreciated the potential of the Scandinavian people's Assembly «Nordic Bildung» as a model of self-organization. The joint work of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National academies of the United States, as well as the development strategy of the State corporation Rosatom, are other examples of actions aimed at forming a «United humanity» in certain aspects.

VUCA world (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), according to experts of JRC (European Commission's Joint Research Centre), is now a special space that corrupts the integrity of science activity, limits thinking and vision of the situation by politicians. In fact, under such conditions, the only reliable resource for scientific organizations is a commercialization, and the payback is a condition of activity. These factors already pose a threat to global security. The mission orientation proposed by European Union experts is still seen as a rather weak alternative.

The problem of characterization scientific knowledge and its difference from other forms of activity has been discussed since antiquity. Nevertheless, in its modern guise, the problem of demarcation of science and non-science appeared in the works of logical positivists and their critic K. Popper. Thanks to their efforts, this problem has become one of the central problems of the philosophy of science of the XX century. However, the difficulties of the well-known classical and modern criteria of demarcation (including the verificationist and falsificationist criteria) prompted the American philosopher of science L. Laudan to declare «the demise of the demarcation problem». According to Laudan, any satisfactory criterion of demarcation must provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, on the basis of which only it will be possible to distinguish between science and non-science. Meanwhile, based on the heterogeneity of the forms of scientific knowledge and long unsuccessful attempts to give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what determines science, Laudan concluded that attempts to find the criterion of demarcation are futile. However, as further investigations have showed, Laudan may have been hasty in his conclusions. In particular, one of the promising approaches to the solution of the demarcation problem may be associated with the idea of family resemblance popularized by L. Wittgenstein and the application of developments from the field of fuzzy logic.

The review provides a description of the bioeconomics from the point of view of experts of the committees of the NAS, USA, accompanied by up-to-date information on the state of affairs in this area. The review suggests that, despite differences in national attributes, bioeconomics concept develops from the national science enterprise model to the global research space model.

The problem of national identity excites the whole European community. In recent years it has become clear that, politically, Europe has proved unable to unite a large number of nations into a constitutional state. In connection with the resurgence of nationalism, the crisis of the single currency, the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), key questions about the future of Europe are actively discussed. Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say: «I am European»? Where does Europe begin and where does it end? Who can legitimately claim to be part of a «European» people? This review is devoted to the discussion of the problem of how, through the data practices, the EU seeks to organize its population as a knowable, manageable unit and as a separate form of nationality.

The paper presents an interpretation of the development of theories that led to the formation of the science management model reflected in the Strategy of Scientific and Technological Development of Russia. The author discovers in the Strategy model the principles, which were proclaimed by W. Bush in his report 75 years ago: giving universities the role of drivers of the country innovative development, team organization and a new social contract. Moreover, the Strategy's practice embodies the same idea of centralizing support for academic research within a single federal agency. In Russia, the Russian Science Foundation has become such an agency. At the same time, further development of management concepts is influenced by foreign trends, including the desire for convergence of sciences in the US research enterprise, the formation of the 3rd generation of innovation policy in Europe, the transition to humanistic terminology in the «Great Reset» project, etc. These trends stimulate Russia's desire to gain a foothold on the «Science Frontier» and offer an adequate response to the Great Challenges. However, to solve these problems, it is necessary to overcome the looseness of the science management structure, implement a hybrid system of public and private support for science, and ensure coordinated efforts within the framework of «bottom-up» innovation processes, with the participation of all stakeholders and with a thorough diagnosis of the strengths and problems of specific regions.

An excursion is given through the pages of the book dedicated to the key employees of S.I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IHST RAS). In their analysis, the authors of the book rely on a strict scientometric approach. However, the analysis is not limited to this approach. It is shown that the authors of the book appear to be pioneers in the combined genre of scientometrics «with a human face». The strict statistics is supplemented with the biographies of scientists and the memoirs of their colleagues as well. The history of the uneasy relations between the government and IHST, based on the example of the fate of leading scientists, can be traced from the moment of the establishment of the institute to the present day. In the Soviet times, the institute experienced ideological pressure, while today IHST shares the fate of other institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In accordance with the title of the book, the authors are apparently trying to reveal the hidden predetermination of events that determined precisely this or that creative «trajectory» in the biographies of the heroes of the book.

The criterion of falsifiability is the cornerstone of the methodological doctrine of K. Popper. According to Popper, a theory is falsifiable and, therefore, scientific if there is at least one statement describing some phenomena in the world with which the prediction derived from this theory is incompatible. If falsified, the theory must be rejected. However, P. Duhem showed that scientific theories are tested experimentally only in conjunction with a number of auxiliary assumptions, the truth of which is implicitly assumed by the experimenter. At the same time, the result of the experiment, which contradicts the predictions of the system «theory and auxiliary assumptions», does not in itself say which component of this system is false. Identifying faulty components is what constitutes the Duhem problem. A promising way to solution of this problem may be associated with the application of Bayes' theorem and the methods of mathematical probability theory and statistics.

The concept of «digital well-being» is used to denote the positive effect of applying of digital technologies in all spheres of modern society. However, as practice shows, new information and communication technologies are quite risky and very ambiguous in the sense of an unconditional benefit for society. This thematic review presents an analysis of scientific sources on key social spheres: healthcare, education, economy, management and social development, media and entertainment, which are currently experiencing the most direct and aggressive impact of digitalization. The purpose of the review is to identify open and unresolved issues related to the ethics of digital well-being of society.

The paper argues that the concept of «managing the future» has become a conceptual component of state strategies for science and technologies development. Think tanks serve as one of the tools of such management. The growth of their number at the turn of the century was noted by many experts, and the author adds the lowing depersonalized trust factor to the list of known explanatory reasons. The example of the Committee on the Future of Electric Power in the U.S. as a temporary creative team in the format of a think tank, is considered. Think tanks act as substitutes for those subjects of management of the future, trust in which is declining in society. The set of such substitutions is rather blurred, its boundaries are uncertain. Consequently, a recent decline in the number of think tanks does not necessarily mean a decline in the number of substitutes.